The Sea Oar House: Memories of a Unique Industry of Old Kinnakeet, North Carolina

Edited excerpt of oral histories recorded for Cape Hatteras National Seashore’s “Ethnohistorical Description of the Eight Villages Adjoining Cape Hatteras National Seashore,” 2005, IAI Inc. Map drawn by B. Garrity-Blake.

The Hatteras Island village of Avon, also known as Kinnakeet, once had an economy fueled not only by commercial fishing and boat building, but also by a seaweed industry. Known locally as “sea oar,” great rafts of eelgrass were collected from Pamlico Sound, dried, baled, and sold to furniture companies as stuffing for sofas, chairs, and mattresses.  

Farrow Scarbrough ran the “sea oar” business, and Avon postmaster Charlie Williams owned a flat barge used to collect the eelgrass. Villagers also gathered huge mounds of the grass that blew to shore each June and spread it out on drying racks in the sun.  

“It breaks loose from the reef every June and gets ashore,” explained L.P. O’Neal. “God almighty it gets rotten – it will turn your house black!” 

The men would turn the eelgrass with pitchforks.  Once dry, the grass was taken to a building south of the post office landing and baled with a “sealer-baler.” A sealer-baler, according to Manson Meekins, “was a compression unit which put that seaweed in a bale, maybe four or five feet long and maybe two feet high and two feet wide.  And they would press it down with a hard presser and put baling wire around it.” 

Once the seaweed was baled, it was loaded onto freight boats and sold to merchants in Elizabeth City. “People used it for mattresses,” Meekins continued. “It was very resilient. You’d press on it and it would come back to its position. But they’d get lumpy after a while.” 

 Ruby Williams remembered when young people held square dances at the old seaweed building or “sea oar house.”  One person played harmonica, another the banjo, and a third the drum, while a caller directed the dance. Some of the older folks were wary of the dances, including a father who came looking for his daughter. 

“We’d blow the lights out, and every one of us would go get behind the bunches of sea oars that they had fixed up ready to be sent off,” said Williams. “He said ‘Mary?’ and I said in a gruff voice, ‘She’s not here!’” 

A superintendent from the Methodist church also did not approve of the sea oar house dances and tried to find out who went down there on Saturday nights. 

“Well, I can tell you that my oldest daughter wasn’t into it.  But I don’t know about my youngest one,” Williams recalled her mother saying. “Mother told him, ‘They’re young, and you’ve been young once. I don’t think they should be turned out of the church. I think they should be put in church and talked to about things!’”  

The “sea oar” industry lasted in Avon until wasting disease decimated 90 percent of the eelgrass beds along the Atlantic coast in the mid 1930s. The disappearance of eelgrass not only spelled the end of the unique Kinnakeet business; it also caused widespread declines in migratory waterfowl that fed on the grass beds.